Pacheco Komahue distanced himself from his novel like someone who breaks off a romantic relationship.
After a year and a half of trying to advance the plot, without adding more than thirty pages, she decided what would have been a euphemism for a couple: take some time.
It had never happened to him to get bogged down in a novel.
He took the first plane leaving for Southeast Asia.
He landed in Kandel.
He bought a ticket for a flight to Vietnam.
But on that trip the fuel tank broke down.
They managed to land and board the lifeboats of every third passenger.
Except Pacheco Komahue: for a mathematical reason, or because he was the only Westerner, he only received a life jacket.
Of course: phosphorescent.
The tide dragged him to a desert island.
He was not much accompanied in Buenos Aires
.
He found coconuts, mangoes, papaya.
Also some strange terrestrial fruits similar to lamb meat.
Crabs and mussels stuck to the stones.
Some mica boulders reflected the sun, and by applying the ray against a specific, flat rock, he cooked the crustaceans and shellfish as on a stove.
Coincidentally, by leaving some dry herbs on that same stone, to vary the flavor of the crab meat, a fire was made.
One day Nunu appeared, a corpulent, tall, naked, rarely tanned woman, with Asian features.
Pacheco Komahue never knew if the young lady had appeared by spontaneous generation, if she had been there for decades, or if she was part of a contingent that remained hidden.
But on the first night
she confirmed that she had not met a man
.
The days that followed were silent company for Pacheco Komahue.
Nunu barely made a sound.
She cooked, she prepared a cool, spongy bed for Pacheco Komahue - she slept outdoors, on the grass or on the shore, depending on the weather;
She bathed him and combed his hair.
He prepared heavenly breakfasts, frugal lunches and austere dinners.
She shaved him with a sharp stone and taught him to fish in the depths of the sea.
Pacheco Komahue tried to serve her too.
She wanted to cook for him at the same time, wash her utensils, invite her to sleep in a bed prepared by him.
But Nunu strictly refused: they were the only times that, even without saying a word, she seemed offended.
Although all his life Pacheco Komahue had considered the dream conditions unnecessary for writing a novel or any other text - free time, a room by the sea, guaranteed subsistence - he had to recognize that his existence with Nunu on the island had inspired him.
One night, involuntarily, under the stars, he narrated chapter 7 to Nunu, where page 30 was interrupted. He had nowhere to write.
He only told him, like Scheherazade to the sultan.
Maybe to give her something even if the woman didn't want to.
And absorbed in her words, apparently incomprehensible, on that occasion Nunu fell asleep in the bed that she had built for Pacheco Komahue.
That night the man spent sleepless.
The next day not only dawned with a new chapter, but also witnessed shocking evidence: Nunu had memorized the entire chapter in Spanish.
He didn't know if Komahue understood it, but he could recite it in pristine Spanish, without any recognizable accent, just a mix of the sound of the sea and the cadence of the background noise of the shore snails.
Every night, Pacheco Komahue narrated a new chapter to Nunu, which she reproduced when the man requested it.
There were evenings when she asked them by number, and she answered exactly.
One night he hugged her and kissed her with a gratitude he had never felt before in his life.
At sunset, on certain days, which Pacheco did not calculate but assumed were the same, Nunu expressed some melancholy, very different from the fury she continued to exhibit when Pacheco Komahue tried to replace her in some task or work for her.
Pacheco Komahue assumed it was because she did not have children.
But Pacheco himself was not looking for them.
One morning a boat of drunks, drugged men and women, members of the jet set, ran aground on the island.
Nunu was sleeping in bed, after the final chapter, particularly moving for Pacheco Komahue;
not only for the content itself, but also for being the latest, corrected and ready.
He had put an end to the novel.
He pondered the implications of taking Nunu with him.
They didn't even ask him why he was boarding.
He set sail with the first light of dawn, almost threatening the helmsman.
In CABA,
he did not remember a single line that he had dictated
.
The novel remained in its thirty pages.
He returned to the counter of his pharmacy.
He forgot his inventor's longings.
Many years later he wrote a story narrating that exotic five years.
He never published it.